Avner May

Contact information

About me

I am a PhD student in the Computer Science department of Columbia University, where my advisor is Prof. Michael Collins. Prior to that, I was a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft for two years, living in Seattle, WA. I graduated in 2009 from Harvard College, where I majored in Mathematics, with a minor in Computer Science. I am originally from Potomac, MD.
Here is a link to my resume(updated 1/31/2017).

Research Interests

My main research areas are in Machine Learning and Speech Recognition. Specifically, I have been working on acoustic modeling, which is a large-scale multi-class classification problem important in speech recognition systems. Most recently, I have focused on scaling kernel methods to this domain using approximation techniques. Although kernel methods have been extensively studied, and have a strong theoretical foundation, there has been relatively little success scaling these methods to large-scale problems like speech recognition and computer vision. Currently, deep learning methods are the state of the art in these domains. I am interested in better understanding the differences between these two families of models, as well as improving these methods.

Prior to working on machine learning/acoustic modeling, I did two years of research in social network analysis, advised by Prof. Augustin Chaintreau; I studied whether social networks like Facebook or Twitter are efficient systems for delivering content of interest to their users (2011-2013).

Other Interests

I love most things that involve being active and outdoors - running, biking, snowboarding, hiking, camping, and basically anything in the mountains. I love fruits and vegetables, and am very interested in food systems and nutrition, and how they affect our health and the environment. I am interested in the ways in which the fields of machine learning and neuroscience can learn from and help one another. For example, could understanding how the brain processes speech help create better speech recognition systems? Additionally, I am interested in how technology and machine learning can be applied to domains such as health and education.